New bill would have barred the release of documents from Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza

A bill before the legislature’s judiciary committee would have kept the writings and journals of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza secret forever by adding a new law that would seal from public view any property seized by search warrant where an arrest never occurs.

The bill reads “property seized in connection with a criminal arrest or seized pursuant to a search warrant without an arrest shall not be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, unless such property is filed in connection with, or introduced into evidence at a criminal, civil or administration proceeding in the Superior Court.”

The state Freedom of Information Commission staff held a meeting Thursday to discuss the bill and plans to oppose it.

“We will be submitting written testimony in opposition to the bill, and will also testify at the public hearing next week,” commission attorney Mary Schwind said.

The targeted bill comes a few months after The Courant won a five-year battle when the state Supreme Court ordered the state police to release thousands of pages of documents they seized from Lanza’s Newtown home days after the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012.

“This is no time to be creating new barriers to information the public should have access to,” said Andrew Julien, the Courant’s publisher and editor-in-chief.

The records included Lanza’s journals, his school work, psychiatric reports and a spreadsheet Lanza kept dating back to the 1700s of mass shooters. They were loaned to FBI profilers but the state police refused to release them once they were returned.

The Courant appealed to the Freedom of Information Commission and won, but the state appealed to state court and a judge overturned the FOI ruling. The Courant then appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the paper’s favor.

The more than 1,000 pages of documents revealed the dark, isolated world that the 20-year-old Lanza descended into leading up to Dec. 14, 2012, when he shot his mother four times as she slept and then drove to the Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 first-graders and six educators before killing himself.

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Diagnosed as a child with a sensory disorder and delays in speech, Lanza would exhibit a quick mind for science, computers, math and language. The few acquaintances he had as a teenager came from video game arcades and online gaming chatrooms. The newly released writings expressed a wide range of emotions and rigid doctrine, from a crippling aversion to a dropped towel, food mixing on his plate and the feel of a metal door handle, to a deep disdain for relationships, an intolerance of his peers, a chilling contempt for anyone carrying a few extra pounds and a conviction that certain aspects of living are worse than death.

At the same time, Lanza also predicted he would make a good father, because he would treat children as independent little people who just didn’t know a lot yet. In a memo-style letter to his mother, Nancy, who lived in the same house, he encouraged her not to be dejected about her life.

From the journal entries, school assignments, an erstwhile screenplay involving pedophilia, education records and psychiatrists’ reports spanning about 15 years of Lanza’s life, several parallel themes emerged, each moving inexorably toward the day when the emaciated loner, crippled by obsession, scornful of most other people and fascinated by the human capacity for murder, committed his unspeakable act of violence.

Then there was the infamous spreadsheet that contained exactly 400 names, dated back to 1786 and included 17 categories sorted by the number that seemed to fascinate Lanza the most — the amount of people killed. The spreadsheet was remarkable for its attention to detail, with categories that included the weapons used, the number of dead or wounded, the date, time and place of the violence and the fate of the perpetrator. Most of the incidents resulted in deaths. Most of the weapons were guns.